You are paying for devices that spy on you, every day. Not only the activity that you conduct on your phone, but the face to face conversations that you’re having in the presence of your phone are being captured, piped back to Google, categorized and acted upon in an automated way, and without your informed consent. Apple is only slightly better in this regard - their new design for privacy is an AI chip that runs on your phone, and doesn’t send the full data of your communications home, it only sends the information for how it has categorized and tagged you. This, you are expected to accept, dear reader, because it’s for the safety of the children.
Of course, the Epstein list will not be revealed. The perpetrators will not be brought to justice. Great hand waving and ceremony will ensue. The greatest crime circles of all time, operating at the highest levels of government and corporate power, will continue uninterrupted. But it’s important that you, dear reader, sacrifice your privacy because the powers that be need to know whether you are involved in criminal activity.
They can’t be bothered to obtain this evidence lawfully. The search and seizure laws that are baked into the Bill of Rights of the United States constitution are very difficult, very cumbersome for government agents to work with. So it’s a matter of national security - they must hear the sounds emitted when you poop. When you’re walking your dog in the morning and you stop to talk to a neighbor, they must hear it. When a few old ladies are chatting about men and relationships and raising children, the government must hear it to ensure that crime is not afoot.
Benjamin Franklin once famously said “Those who would give up liberty for safety will lose both, and deserve neither.” The concept of a government which is increasingly tyrannical, strangling the life out of the culture and society that it claims to serve is not new. This is the very basis on which the revolutionary war was fought. “No taxation without representation” was not a protest of inconvenience, it was the difference between a life of indentured servitude and the chance, even at the cost of uncertainty and danger, to leave one’s own mark on the world. To have one’s life and actions be the consequence of one’s own moral compass, rather than playing the role of an extra in the story of someone more important.
An exercise for the reader: Turn your phone on airplane mode. Go and have a conversation with someone else. Bring up some topics that you wouldn’t normally talk about, or haven’t talked about in a while. Now watch as these topics pop up in your YouTube feed, your Amazon suggestions, your Facebook feed, and elsewhere. Now if your phone was on airplane mode, there’s only one explanation for this. The other person’s phone:
- Was listening through the microphone, even though no one activated it
- Piped all the data of the conversation to the company’s servers for analysis
- Used voice identification to know the participants in the conversation
- Found related online identities and notified them of your interests and preferences
- Got paid by third parties for harvesting the details of your private conversation
Do you know what Palintir is? Palintir is a company so brazen that it is named literally for the manner of evil that it seeks to manifest in the world. The name comes from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings book series, where the Palintir were stones that allowed whoever gazed into them to remote view events at any location and time. The catch? One of the stones was possessed by Sauron, the dark lord himself, and Sauron’s influence would find its way to whoever used the stones, causing them to see things that would increase the madness and the darkness in their hearts. The wizard Sauraman possessed one, and it was credited for his fall from the light. The king Denethor of Gondor had one, and ultimately committed suicide based on a false understanding of what he saw there.
Pretty in your face huh? This is like if a voting machine company were to call itself “Dominion.”
If only tech companies could take inspiration from video games, we could enjoy more creative company names like “Death Gaze Spinecrusher”, or “Stink Rot the Putrid.”
Our real world Palintir? Is a company responsible for collecting all of your data that can be harvested from any source, and building a profile on you that is able to tell the user what sort of person you are, and predict whether you may be a threat or an asset to them. Collecting this sort of information on all Americans without the requisite warrants would be highly illegal under our constitution. So Palintir offered the government a solution: They would privatize the collection of the data and sell it to the government (and other parties) to use at their discretion. Palintir is the missing number 6 on the list above, and perhaps the best paying and most eager to receive the data from your phone.
Have you heard the term “Public-Private Partnership”? Palintir is one of them. The infamous dictator of Italy, Mousilini, coined a different term for this sort of relationship. He called it “fascism”: the merging of corporate and state power. Ah, the honesty of dictators, whose power is made manifest and for whom mincing words is no longer worth the effort. Palintir has received big contracts from the first Trump presidency, the Biden presidency, and the second Trump presidency. Where is the party we can vote for that is not implementing Technocracy? Do you really believe they’re looking for criminal activity as you would define it? Or are they more interested in detecting disobedience?
There is one poem which captures the whole plot curve of the Lord of the Rings story in a few short lines:
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
We were warned many times throughout history by great authors (Tolkien), musicians (Pink Floyd), and even politicians (Eizenhower) about the dangers of giving our power away and accepting these gifts, these conveniences, which ultimately betray us to their true masters.
What meaning for the rings of power could be more clearly and presciently meant than the smartphones we now hold in our hands?
